Top of the Clots - Royal Blood Interview

Just before you release your debut single, it doesn’t hurt if the drummer from Arctic Monkeys wears your band’s t-shirt. Especially if he’s onstage at Glastonbury in a performance watched on television by millions.

“I got a message from Matt Helders asking for a t-shirt,” Ben Thatcher (drummer, not to be confused with the ex-Man City player of the same name, and definitely no relation to herself) explains backstage outside Marlay House in Dublin shortly before taking to the picturesque parkland stage at Arctic Monkeys’ mammoth all-dayer with Jake Bugg and Miles Kane.
“I thought it was a wind-up,” Thatcher continues. “He ended up hearing one of our tracks, which we’d put online. We didn’t have any t-shirts so we made him one. He ended up wearing it at Glastonbury, an amazing surprise. Arctic Monkeys have been very good to us. We played with them in Finsbury Park; they have us on the bill today.”
Royal Blood do have a t-shirt to sell for the occasion and soon they’ll have a self-titled debut album too. It marks the culmination of quite a remarkable year for the fledgling duo, who only formed in 2012. They became the talk of South by Southwest in Texas and garnered a BBC Sound Of 2014 nomination, a poll that seems to have an astonishingly accurate strike rate when it comes to tipping an artist for the big time.
Today they’re literally just off the ferry from Scotland’s T in the Park, which they describe as another “magical moment”. The pair are completely shattered, without a wink of sleep and end up cancelling the rest of the day’s promotional commitments. Still, they’re thrilled to be taking in that sweet Marlay air.
“This is the reason you’re traveling: to get to these moments. We’re more than willing to sacrifice our sleep and health just to do that,” Thatcher says sleepily.
“This is beautiful,” singer Mike Kerr exclaims. “It is amazing to be here. Where do you go from this?”
Royal Blood make an astonishing racket for a two-piece. “We just do what we do,” Kerr says. “To be honest when we started playing together we felt like we didn’t need anyone else and that sense remains. We’ve both been in four-piece bands and so on... it wasn’t a deliberate ‘let’s be a duo’ thing. We just go out and do what we do.”
“There are no electric guitars on any of our songs,” he continues. “We started to use three amplifiers onstage because I think we forgot for a second that there are only two in the band.”
In addition to Matt Helders, Yannis Philippakis of Foals has been singing their praise, saying, “it’s about time there was something heavy again that’s relevant.”
At the Brit Awards aftershow Muse’s Matt Bellamy also told the star-struck duo he was a fan. “It’s a bit weird when a band we’re fans of likes us,” Kerr says. “He came over and told us he’d seen us on YouTube. We talked about bass guitar effects.”
“We didn’t anticipate any response, really, when we started,” says Kerr. “We had no real agenda – we were having a bit of fun and making some tunes. So when I look back and see how far it’s come, it’s pretty amazing.”
How did they settle on this minimal drum and bass formula? “When we wrote ‘Figure it Out’ we realised we could get away with just bass and drums,” Kerr explains. “That and ‘Little Monster’ became very important, songs that opened the door. We can’t wait for people to hear the rest. We’ve been sitting on the album for a long time: it will be exciting to finally get it out.”
Royal Blood offered fans a novel way to receive a permanent souvenir by having a tattoo artist on call to ink devotees at the merchandise stall.
“That was a one-off in December for our last show of the year,” Thatcher explains. “The guy who does our artwork knocked up a few tattoos. It’s pretty hard to pull off. It’s one guy and a needle and there’s only so much time in the world. It’s not something you could do for every single show. It went well with fans. They were queuing up as if we were giving out free booze.”
Mike Kerr looks like he’s just had a brainwave. “Hmm, there’s a thought...” he mutters sleepily.

Royal Blood is out on August 22